Copyright © 2018 by Author/s and Licensed by Lectito BV, Netherlands. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change, 2018, 3(1), xx ISSN: 2589-1316 Stay in Your Own Part of the Bookshop! Legitimation in the Literary Field and the Limited Exchange Value of Celebrity Capital David C. Giles 1 * 1 University of Winchester, West Hill, SO22 4NR Winchester, UNITED KINGDOM *Corresponding Author: David.Giles@winchester.ac.uk Citation: Giles, D. C. (2018). Stay in Your Own Part of the Bookshop! Legitimation in the Literary Field and the Limited Exchange Value of Celebrity Capital, Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change, 3(1), xx. https://doi.org/10.20897/jcasc/xxxxx Published: July 30, 2018 ABSTRACT This paper explores the phenomenon of boundary crossing between cultural fields and the role that different kinds of capital play in determining whether or not the crossing is a successful one. The fields in question here are those of entertainment (specifically, stand-up comedy) and literature, and the particular boundary crossing is represented by the figure of Ben Elton, a British comedian who has published 15 novels since 1989, with mixed critical and commercial success. One novel (Popcorn, 1996) received sufficient attention within the literary field to be long-listed for the Booker prize, an accolade usually reserved for writers belonging to the sub-field ‘literary fiction’. Others have fared less well, and after many years Elton’s credentials as a writer are still queried in some reviews of his work. I suggest that, from a close analysis of reviews in the UK press, Elton’s boundary crossing was initially enhanced by the amount of celebrity capital that he was able to export to the literary field. Despite his evident intention to remain a serious practitioner in that field, however, this capital has increasingly diminishing returns, and legitimation of his work is forever hampered by the image of his celebrity persona. Keywords: bourdieu, celebrity, cultural fields, literary field, fiction INTRODUCTION The study of symbolic boundaries in social and cultural life has largely focused on their role in producing inequalities of social class, race and religion (Bourdieu, 1984; Lamont, 2000). In this paper I am examining a somewhat different type of boundary crossing, one in which the agent would appear to carry a good deal of useful capital, but where that capital proves to be of limited use in achieving full legitimation in a different cultural field. I am speaking specifically of celebrity capital (Driessens, 2013) and its exchange value in the literary field, particularly at its high-status end, the sub-field known as ‘literary fiction’. Celebrity capital has been conceived as “accumulated media visibility that results from recurrent media representations” (Driessens, 2013, p. 543), and enables celebrities to cross from unrelated fields such as entertainment into politics (Arthurs and Shaw, 2016), or across boundaries that separate high-status fields from lower ones, such as Paul McCartney’s migration from popular to classical music (Giles, 2015). However, as the case of McCartney suggests, while celebrity capital can secure a foothold in a higher status field it does not guarantee legitimation in that field if other important credentials are required, such as the cultural capital accumulated through formal education within that field. The literary field, like the musical field broadly conceived, consists of a similar hierarchy, particularly where fiction is concerned. At the top is found the rarified subfield of literary fiction, a category that has been largely invented by publishers and booksellers in recent years to indicate “quality” or “highbrow” fiction, although its